There is a rich body of prior art regarding user interface design, and access control design. Each of those regions, however, has been traditionally treated without regard for the other, and integration of access control into a facile and consistent user interface has not been the focus of development in the prior art. Apart from systems that announce user permissions by alteration of an icon (such as by the addition of a padlock to the icon of a file to indicate that the file itself has a “locked” attribute), the integration of access control into the user interface is largely an afterthought in the prior art.